Weather Bidding and Conversion Optimizer

Hello! We are building out the docs to launch weather bidding in our AdWords account. Currently we are using Conversion Optimizer/Target CPA bidding. What will happen when we execute this script? Will it run in tandem with conversion optimizer? Will it not run at all? Do we need to turn off Conversion Optimizer before executing the script?

I couldn't find any other details on this so apologies if this is elsewhere -- feel free to shoot me a link

Re: Weather Bidding and Conversion Optimizer

Hi @Katie B (thanks @MosheTLV). Target CPA and bidding by weather are not really compatible with each other because they're different strategies that are likely to compete with each other.

When you choose to bid by CPA, you're saying that you know what cost per acquisition works for your product, and AdWords will automatically adjust bids to attempt to hit that target. When you bid by weather, you're saying that you know you make greater or fewer sales in different weather conditions and you want to adjust bids based upon that. Effectively therefore CPA bidding is about return on investment while bidding for weather is about conversion numbers, they're different objectives. It's like saying you want to drive a car both as fast as you can, and the most economically, the two are mutually exclusive. You can say I want to drive so that I average X miles per gallon (CPA) or I want to drive faster when it's sunny and slower when it's raining (weather) but you can't really do both. It may seem like you should be able to, but imagine a period of a month where it's sunny every day, and another period where it's raining every day, clearly you're not going to have the same MPG in those two periods.

Having said this, if you've enough statistically significant data, it might be possible to combine the two as an approximation. If you get more sales when it's sunny, it might be possible to bid higher and maintain the same CPA, so you could script to hit a target CPA and include a bid adjustment for weather but in honesty I'm not sure the results would be any better than those achieved by Target CPA alone.

The only option I can think of that would work is to use different CPA targets for different weather conditions. It's not possible to alter the CPA target of a strategy via scripts but you can change the entire chosen strategy, so if you created three flexible strategies, one for each of three weather conditions, you could in theory apply them as necessary via a script. However, changing strategies frequently is not a good idea so unless you're in a region where it's sunny for weeks at a time, then raining for weeks at a time, you'll probably get poor results.

What were your objectives in bidding by weather and why were you originally bidding by CPA?

Re: Weather Bidding and Conversion Optimizer

Hi @Katie B (thanks @MosheTLV). Target CPA and bidding by weather are not really compatible with each other because they're different strategies that are likely to compete with each other.

When you choose to bid by CPA, you're saying that you know what cost per acquisition works for your product, and AdWords will automatically adjust bids to attempt to hit that target. When you bid by weather, you're saying that you know you make greater or fewer sales in different weather conditions and you want to adjust bids based upon that. Effectively therefore CPA bidding is about return on investment while bidding for weather is about conversion numbers, they're different objectives. It's like saying you want to drive a car both as fast as you can, and the most economically, the two are mutually exclusive. You can say I want to drive so that I average X miles per gallon (CPA) or I want to drive faster when it's sunny and slower when it's raining (weather) but you can't really do both. It may seem like you should be able to, but imagine a period of a month where it's sunny every day, and another period where it's raining every day, clearly you're not going to have the same MPG in those two periods.

Having said this, if you've enough statistically significant data, it might be possible to combine the two as an approximation. If you get more sales when it's sunny, it might be possible to bid higher and maintain the same CPA, so you could script to hit a target CPA and include a bid adjustment for weather but in honesty I'm not sure the results would be any better than those achieved by Target CPA alone.

The only option I can think of that would work is to use different CPA targets for different weather conditions. It's not possible to alter the CPA target of a strategy via scripts but you can change the entire chosen strategy, so if you created three flexible strategies, one for each of three weather conditions, you could in theory apply them as necessary via a script. However, changing strategies frequently is not a good idea so unless you're in a region where it's sunny for weeks at a time, then raining for weeks at a time, you'll probably get poor results.

What were your objectives in bidding by weather and why were you originally bidding by CPA?

Re: Weather Bidding and Conversion Optimizer

Basically automated bidding would not work with that script, because weather bidding is form of Manual CPC.As you use new method of bidding I recomend you to test it at first at separate campaing and compare effectiveness with old campaign using Conversion Optimizer.

Re: Weather Bidding and Conversion Optimizer

Thanks @Jon_Gritton! This is extremely helpful. I wasn't necessarily wanting to do both, more just curious of the potential ramifications, which you covered - thanks! My question really arose when I started reading more about how the script works, and the way I understand it, the script will adjust the location bid modifiers based on the parameters you set and the current weather conditions. But I didn't think you could apply location bid adjustments when you are using automated bidding. Maybe I am confusing that with mobile bid adjustments? The AdWords documentation for Target CPA bidding says "Because Target CPA optimizes your bids based on real-time data, your existing bid adjustments are not used." So I honestly wasn't even sure it would work, which is how I got here.

Everything you said makes total sense. I think we may just need to test it on one campaign and see what happens. We are really looking to drive leads/conversions and get more of those when it rains, so the objective was to drive more leads when it rains, if that answers your last question?

I do like the idea of adjusting Target CPA with the weather, but you make a great point that this would really only make sense if the weather stays consistent, which it really doesn't where I am. So I'm not sure we would be able to see if that worked or not given the amount of changes that would be needed.

Thanks again for the feedback and feel free to let me know if you have any other thoughts based on this. Have a great day!

Re: Weather Bidding and Conversion Optimizer

Hi @Katie B just to confirm, if you're using Target CPA optimisation, it'll ignore any manually (and that includes things set by a script) set bid adjustments, so if you use Target CPA, there's no point in running a script to adjust bids by location.

What you could do, and which may be quite useful, is to change your Ads based upon the weather or (depending upon your business), which Keywords are enabled/paused. So if it's sunny, your Ads can mention that, if it's rainy, you can enable a rain relevant Keyword and so on.

It still wouldn't be ideal because it's likely to screw with the long-term process that bidding strategies like to take, but it's worth exploring...

And you're reading my mind on the ads! I actually thought about that yesterday but haven't done any research on executing that yet. If you know of any documentation please share, I'll be looking around online for this today.